D2D cooperation for efficient transmission of live multi-view video in LTE-A cellular networks

Abstract

The demand for video content over cellular networks is growing at a monumental scale. The inception of the fourth generation broadband cellular network technology (4G) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) broadband cellular network technology have enabled unabated mobile video adoption. However, video traffic is causing considerable load on the already-limited network resources. This is posing a new landscape of challenges to service and network providers in distributing bandwidthhungry services such as Multi-View Video (MVV). A paradigm to circumvent this challenge would be to allow direct communication between closely located User Equipment (UE) without data routing via the radio and core network. Device-toDevice (D2D) capable networks promise scalability and performance improvements in utilising scarce resources. In this work, a mode selection strategy at the Base Station (BS) is being proposed. It takes into account segment availability information at the UE to decide whether the Mobile User (MU) should receive dedicated resources via traditional Content Delivery Network (CDN) or reuse existing resources via the D2D communications channel. A novel architecture whereby the BS in the Radio Access Network (RAN) has video buffers, with caching maps which are aware of the video preferences of users in cell sites is analysed. This report is the foundation to build a proximity enhanced D2D live video streaming system with no additional infrastructure for mobile devices. The simulation results provide guidelines for maximising view and user diversity as well as bandwidth scalability in LTE networks in order to achieve high system resource utilisation whilst mitigating load on the network.